Another side effect is that the signal to noise of product reviews on the internet have gone way down. It feels like you can only find glowing reviews of any product when you do a search. Youtubers, blog operators, etc are all incentivized to say a product is great and link to amazon with their affiliate code.
After all, how can you read a review on something if you're not going to use it? Which seems like a pretty big impact on the efficiency of the entire market.
